March 8, 2012

I agree. In the video — which appears in long form at the link — Obama is a Harvard Law student introducing a highly respected Harvard Law professor, and he does an outstanding job, displaying the now-familiar charm, and even breaking the tension and getting a laugh from a crowd of protesters that had been displaying a grim, aggrieved demeanor. I am impressed by Obama's mildness and moderation in this video, and I remember very well the controversy that led to Professor Derrick Bell's protest in 1990. I was a visiting professor at Boston University Law School in the fall of 1990, and I used to attend a reading group called "FemCrits" that included BU, Harvard, and other female law professors in the area. I saw and heard plenty of the radical lawprofs of that era, and Barack Obama does not come across as their acolyte. He seems independently well-grounded and perhaps even aloof from the controversy. Obama had just been elected president of the Harvard Law Review, its first black president. That put him in a position where he may have been called upon to do the introduction, and he handles the task with diplomacy and aplomb. What I see in that video is a great and natural politician, not some hardcore radical.

OTOH, one thing that was very noticeable in the video was Obama's weird tic of putting his hand in and out of his pocket continually. It does send the subliminal message about putting his hands in our pockets now that he can reach them.

The one point that interested me was that this Prof Ogletree was so happy this had been suppressed, so I do wonder if we're looking at a Chinese water torture of vids for the Demos leading up to a real October surprise.

BTW, didn't know the Breitbart org had recruited Ben Shapiro. With him, as well as O'Keefe and Giles, they've got quite a band of Young Turks.

PS Noticed GodZero's delivery hasn't changed one iota in 20 years or so.

tsk, tsk.. you fell into that trap too? Haha. I hope the Breitbart team is smart enough to bait the media to think 'nothing to see here' it and then BOOM! Personally I feel it is enough if they are effective in showing media's complacency and protection of Obama and that they hid these things. Pollak who appears poised and articulate and with some help from Amy Holmes in this CNN video has the idiot Soledad flailing. Make the media uncomfortable and hurt them where it means, their credibility -- make them look like fools if they are not already seen that way.

I agree that the video contained nothing even slightly damaging. What struck me was how little Obama's voice and inflection have changed since then--although it wasn't of course very many years ago. It's also interesting that his g-dropping, which I'd regarded as an affectation before selected audiences--was evident then as well, so perhaps it isn't an affectation at all.

Thing is, even if there was something he said that was overtly radical and weird, well, it was in 1990, he was in law school, and just developing his chops. It wouldn't have mattered much, especially if he repudiated whatever he would have said that was out of the mainstream.

That said, had the media been at all interested in "vetting" candidate Obama, this, and much more would have been 5 year old news.

Here I was looking forward to an aggrieved explanation from Althouse about how it's not at all unusual for a law review editor to favor selling white people into slavery to pay for reparations, and how irritatingly ignorant we are not to know that any elite law school will want to enroll as many avowed Trotskyist revolutionaries as it possibly can. And now there's no occasion for it.

The vetting is, of course, the broader point. Or rather, the MSM's lack of vetting in the 2008 election. Why was hiding this video so important? It's obviously nothing much, and Althouse is right that Obama comes across well in this.

Again, Breitbart's broader point was the double standard used by the media.

You may think it's a total dud and maybe this is all they've got and maybe it's weak tea, but the fact that it was specifically held back by his allies says otherwise. The fact that republicans are constantly 'guilty by association' if they wander into the same zip code as any controversial figure says otherwise.

It's still tea. And if I were a liberal, I'd be pretty nervous until I was sure that was all they had.

This guilt-by-association genre is something that critics go to when there's nothing else to criticize. It used to be a favorite of the Left but it seems to be catching on on the Right.

This video is a throwback to 2008. Obama has 3 years as President now, so what he did 20 years ago doesn't matter very much. We are no longer trying to see what he'd do as President if elected- he is President and he has done many things.

I suppose it's "proof" that the President is a radical, maybe. But so what? What matters is how he governs, which everyone can see, and we can vote based on that reality.

Prof Ogletree may have been joking but there is nothing funny about the way so many supposedly objective media types have chosen to handle Obama from his early days as a national figure (2004) up to the present.

While some see an evil conspiracy, I just see willful idealogical blindness. People aren't doing their job. I'm not laughing.

At CPAC Bretbart said "I have videos...so there may very well be more. I don't belive for a minute that he thought the video released would be damning. But his tactic (incorrectly stated here as making his accusers relax) is to get people to push back, and take a stand, to be able to show them as liars and hypocrites in real time.

Prof Ogletree may have been joking but there is nothing funny about the way so many supposedly objective media types have chosen to handle Obama from his early days as a national figure (2004) up to the present.

And like Obama, Bell seemed very fond of his imagination when it came to race. Can't find some racism to point to? Make it up! Granted, Obama didn't try to claim that white people would sell blacks to aliens, but he did warn us about the people who were going to, Some time in the future, complain he didn't look like the pictures on the money.

Waiting for white people to Do something racist is so inefficient. So make stuff up. Like aliens!

And really, did Obama assign this guy all the time? Was it as a warning not to be creatively insane in the pursuit of racial justice? An anti-example?

So let me get this straight. Obama has not exactly been a fine steward for the country’s economy and fiscal health over the last three years… And this is what we get – A video tape from Obama College years????

Critical Race Theory… Jeremiah Wright… Saul Alynski blah blah blah. Charles Ogletree says we hid the video (may or may not have been joking – once again EDITED so we don’t see the whole context of the comment). No one outside the Republican Party cares about any of this. The US economy is in hell, and this is what the great minds of the Conservative Collective can bring to the table to try and defeat the President????

This is red meat for the Conservative carnivores. Someone please tell me – How the HELL is trying to show how the press didn’t vette the sitting President because they were so in love with the concept of having a black man win the Presidency going to help you NOW???? Answer – It’s not. No one outside your little circle cares much about any of this. He’s got three years in office to be judged by, and drudging up this old crap is the best the Conservatives can do???

The Hug. The Hug was suppressed. The Hug would not have been suppressed by Ogletree and the MSM if it was not significant. More to come, I'm sure. Wait for the pooh-pooh-poohs, then POW! #IAmBreibarticus.

To judge if this tells us anything about what Obama thought about race when he was a law student at Harvard, we need to know more about Bell's thinking.

Did Bell think that, as a class, white people cannot be trusted? Does "Critical Race Theory", a theory associated with Bell, have racist undertones? In short, can Bell fairly be described as having racist views?

Maybe you don't care if the press does it's job, but some of us think it's important.

The vetting of the winning candidate in 2008 was a complete and total failure and dereliction of the press's duty.

You can't fix something until you show what's broken. That's all Breitbart was ever about. He was liberal socially, and right wing politically, and that means truth matters and a free, challenging, and fair press is absolutely not to be abandoned, just because they favor your side.

The right may be losing the election by their stand on that, but the left is losing the country and everything it's about.

A few journalists like Solodad O'Brian had meltdowns over this video. But for the most part, it has prompted outcries of "this is nothing!".

I believe the Breitbart plan was to get everyone on record with some kind of a response to an Obama college era video, so they can say, "you responded to the first video, how should we interpret your silence on this one?"

“There’s nothing new about the clip or Obama’s role in the controversy at Harvard Law School,” PBS said. “It’s been online at our site and on YouTube since [2008].”

Well, video of Jeremiah Wright's bizarre rants were available FOR SALE on his church's website. Didn't make it any less noteworthy that they showed the Democratic nominee for president sat by while his pastor shrieked about how the U.S. invented AIDS to wipe out the world's black population.

Breitbart was more into proving the media is in bed with the Democratic Party than into taking down President Obama. So I think this "Vet the President" campaign is more about the media and the fact that they did not vet the President the way they did Sarah Palin or even Joe the Plumber. And I think there is more coming. But again, remember it's about the media, not so much Obama.

Whining anout Reverand Wright, while ignoring the3 fact that our past President appointed 100's of attorneys from a university founded by a far right wing, bigoted preacher makes Hoosier look like what he is; a racist.

And for you to assume the people who attend Pat Robertson University aren't in tune with his political and religious beliefs illustrates how stupid you are.

Can Althouse substantiate her characterization of Prof. Bell has "highly respected"?

We have seen Prof. Henry Louis Gates in person after his run-in with the police sergeant, and I at least was not impressed - favorably that is, and I suspect some of these "studies" professors may be political showcase trophies not that "highly regarded" by the actual powers that be at Harvard, which, I believe, are still as lily-white as ever.

The other, if Prof. Bell does turn out to have been someone actually accomplished and influential, is the question of suitability. For me, there is something very disturbing about Bill Ayers being a Distinguished Professor of Elementary Education at UI, Chicago, and Bernardine Dohrn being a Professor of Law(!) at Northwestern.

Then again he appointed Van Jones as one of his czars who is a self described communist and truther. And Anita Dunn whose favorite philosopher is mass murdering communist (but I repeat myself) Mao tse Tung.

Ann, please tell me you didn't vote for Obama to make things easier at the Madison cocktail parties, or to somehow seem mysterious, enigmatic, or falsely balanced. I read this site every day.

With all you have exposed over the last year, concerning Walker, Wisconsin, and Union power, please tell me you're not going to reverse course Nationally. You are part of Breitbart's army of citizen journalists. At least I thought so.

The point to the vetting is Obama is NOT who he claims to be. And the larger story in the Media Complex as a member of the Obama election team. Breitbart was right. Objectivity and Neutrality are big lies!!

Yeah, I'd say it's a dud, but where it excels is in the maturation of where Urkel strawed and steeped his ideology from. Does a calm, cool, calculating radical embrace his presented radical professor if they were in like mind?

Someone mentioned the oddness of Urkel moving his hand in and out of his pocket. That is a subliminal sign of someone trying to hide something. But as we already know, Urkel has nothing to hide and nothing to fear for he is surrounded by the company of other like minded tools of the left. This is what the left is, this is where Urkel was made. This is how Urkel cemented his contacts into his foray into politics. This is how he exercised his deviant ideology, not as a raving, spittling ideologue, but one with a demeanor of a cold, calculating Palpatinesque delivery. Now we know where he was groomed. We can see it's outcome today.

“I think there are all kinds of black individuals and black organizations that could be considered as "racist." But there are one hell of a lot more white individuals and organizations that fit the bill. Why are you wasting your time trying to refute such an obvious point?”

There are more racists whites because there are more whites, or because they are more inherently racist? Most rational people would agree with the former, reject the latter. I think people like Bell believe whites are more inherently racist.

“And why are you and others here so out of your little minds crazy over a fucking video from 22 years ago?”

If you can point to a post that show me to be out of my mind on this, I won’t accuse you of making shit up. Obama either associated with an extremist (again), or he didn’t. The age of the video means absolutely nothing.

“Breitbart, the guy you apparently worship...was a liberal 22 years ago.”

You do rely on hyperbole don’t you? I was a liberal in college too. Lots of us were. Then we grew the hell up.

You didn’t answer: Why would you want a professor who doesn’t trust white Americans to teach at a university? Why on earth? Unless you think that there simply are no qualified black professors who don't hold such racist views.

I think this video will prove to be the biggest story in the history of the universe.

I also predict Hoosier, CJinPA and some of the others regulars here will spend the next months and even years watching and watching and rehashing every moment, maybe even creating trading cards that can be sold and traded amongst the millions of American who will be affected by the video.

So, what's your cutoff date for events that can and cannot be referenced? It had been "22 years" but now you've shortened it to....2006? Which is cool because now I don't have to hear a liberal criticize Bush's invasion of Iraq ever again.

Well I listed two of his appointees who share an affinity with the ideology that murdered 100 million in the last century. Then again his dad was a Marxist. Mom seemed to be attracted to the type and he even wrote in his book that he was drawn to radicals and Marxists in college.

Love wrote: I also predict Hoosier, CJinPA and some of the others regulars here will spend the next months and even years watching and watching and rehashing every moment, maybe even creating trading cards that can be sold and traded amongst the millions of American who will be affected by the video.

I predict that "Love" will mysteriously disappear one day like Jeremy did. But then, at some undetermined time, he/she will reappear claiming to have been a gay male all along.

Love, sweetie, nothing I've said remotely suggests that I'm "really, really upset" about anything. In fact I said "no big deal" on the Alinsky panel and Obama doing his social duty introducing the respected professor.

Are you having vapours because I pointed out that a social duty does not force one to assign reading? Or that one can claim not to have listened to sermons but can not claim not to know what is in the books you assign your students?

Maybe the vapours are because I pointed out that being up in arms over a fantasy scenario where white people sell black people to alien invaders is not rational. Yet, in order to get our non-racist credit we've got to pretend that this outrageous fantasy is wise and insightful or at least just a quaint and colorful nothing?

The video is a dud only if you think glad-handing with racists and communists is befitting a Presidential candidate, even if he does it with a natural ease.

Though Althouse may have been comfortable with people like Bell on campus in the law schools, most of America was as yet unaware that the universities had been so completely usurped by socialists, and were indoctrinating their kids with leftism.

So some people might have been shocked by this in 1990, provided they didn't work in a universitiy setting.

The slow march through the institutions is boring to professors and the MSM. The rest of us are less sanguine.

Not even a dud. Obama looks earnest and poised. He could use this in his campaign.....The Rev. Wright and Ayers are jerks whose jerkiness is shockingly obvious. I'm not familiar with Prof. Bell, but, if he were a jerk, he war a jerk in a dignified, stately Ivy League way....I don't think that Obama has ever been quite as radical as some of his friends. But not once in his entire life has he ever criticized anyone on the left for being too far left.

Love -“I think there are all kinds of black individuals and black organizations that could be considered as "racist." But there are one hell of a lot more white individuals and organizations that fit the bill. Why are you wasting your time trying to refute such an obvious point?”

This might surprise someone so stuck in their bias, but there are more white individuals and organization of all kinds than their are black ones.

The point is you don't have the balance or objectivity to name a single one that's black, yet you are more than willing to name white ones. That's just another example of what you asked for: proof of your racism.

1) You don't judge people equally based on their skin color.2) You infantilize blacks by assuming they can't handle the equal treatment.

That's your prerogative, but I just thought you might want to learn how it looks to others.

@CJinPA: Black (and all) people can expect to be treated like adults if they behave like adults. And most do. But those who go around deliberately scaring people, disturbing the peace, or even just (pseudo)politely demanding handouts because their ancestors were slaves, have chosen to be big babies and are rightly treated like it.

"I voted for (and donated to) Obama in 2008; I'll vote for him again in 2012 (because of his position on issues other than higher education). But this video shows an Obama who at least at one time was far more committed, on a personal level, to an extreme version of campus "diversity" than anyone who hadn't attended the 1990 Harvard Law rally previously realized. No one should harbor any illusions that a second Obama term will not continue the first's disastrous record on higher education."

So even after criticizing Obama's "embrace" of Bell's theories, KC still affirms his continued support.

Breitbart.com is vetting the media. The real story is the fact that the media removed information when it found newsworthy sources, which it should have reported about. The only reason people may not feel any response to this fact, which is being put right in front of them by the Breitbart.com team, is because people have been conditioned not to question the media's narrative for so long. Welcome to your awakening from the deep slumber!

*Let's be clear about Bell's effort: he was seeking to browbeat the Harvard Law School administration into making a quota hire, and he regularly used race-baiting rhetoric in the process. Yet Obama, in the Buzzfeed video, endorsed Bell's aims. There's no evidence that Obama, as either a state legislator or senator, backed a quota-hiring bill, and presumably he no longer supports the idea. But in his next press conference, he should be asked whether and, if so, why he abandoned his earlier support for quotas in law school faculty hiring.

* …And what exactly was the scholarship that earned Obama's gushing praise? Bell was a pioneer of critical race theory, the idea that the American legal system is so embedded with racism that a neutral application of the law is impossible.

Shouldn't the regualr Obama-haters be concentrating on things that just a tad more "current"...if they really want to make points?

Between Hoosier whining about Marxism, and the rest of you screaming to high heaven about a 22 year old video...which has been online for 4 years (nobody here have a computer until recently??)...you're wasting your time.

I say you get out there and help Santorum/Romney/Newt wipe out pre-natal care for women and contraception and a woman's choice and "government" having literaly ANYTHING to do with our daily lives.

Thomas Sowell (in 1990) on the Prof. Bell situation at Harvard. http://tinyurl.com/74vnxmr. Of course, Sowell isn't considered idealogically black by people like Prof. Bell. He's a "real" person comfortable in his skin and it makes me not see his skin color.

And shouldn't two black Secretaries of State equal at least 100 lawyers from a "racist" university? Kills me how black folk rationalize their racism against white folk.

Obama is asking the audience to "open their hearts and minds" to Critical Race Theory. He certainly opened his mind to it as he assigned extensive readings of Bell in his University of Chicago course on race and law.

In my view, this video, together with other information, speaks volumes about what sort of President we have.

Give it another 15-20 years and we will be seeing YouTube videos of candidates at Girls Gone Wild parties. Imagine how the social media and cell phone cameras will fuck up some political careers.

It's going to be glorious.

But this video was a yawner. Like I said before, I already knew from his own words and who he associated with what kind of person he is. I think the majority who voted for him just ignored it cause it ruined the image they created.

Obama taught Critical Race Theory at the University of Chicago. He required students to read nearly all of Derrick Bell's writings, even some of the most heavily racialist ones.

This is not going away anytime soon. Drip drip drip.

What we're seeing now is many people spin what Critical Race theory is. Some of them have some history with it and are defensive. Some just like Obama and worry what the rust belt will think of this prejudiced and rather stupid theory.

So what's next? I think what's next is something that will correct those who laughed off Crits as no biggie.

Dustin - Disagreeing with one's politics, especially concerning race...and those coming from a black person's point of view...is rather silly...unless you yourself are black and offer some kind of counter argument. (Are you black?)

Here's the Mr. Bell you denigrate:

Holding a position as an assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter and Constance Baker Motley. (What a bunch of losers.)

He supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases and spearheaded the fight of James Meredith to secure admission to the University of Mississippi over the protests of Governor Ross Barnett. (Is that all?)

He was appointed to the law faculty of the University of Southern California as executive director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty. (No big deal?)

Hired to teach at Harvard, Bell established a new course in civil rights law, published a celebrated case book, Race, Racism and American Law, and produced a steady stream of law review articles. As a teacher, Bell became a mentor and role model to a generation of students of color, becoming the first black tenured professor in Harvard Law School's history.(Hey, who hasn't?)

The, in 1980 Bell became the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, becoming one of the first African-Americans to ever head a non-black law school.(No big deal?)

Actually, I think it's that in law school, there are a lot of people who are treated as respectable despite being critical race theorists or other bizarre views. And that's good, of course. You want free exchange of controversial ideas in school and it's too bad this doesn't extend all the way to the right.

The thing is, Obama is not a law prof. He's president of a system he may think is inherently racist. I'm not sure what the coming material will show, but it might show a guy who doesn't really want his administration to be successful at the things I want it to be successful at.

Personally, I believe that the spending these days is the Cloward Piven strategy to create tremendous dependence. I think Obama is hugely in favor of a radical change to our society. I think he should be vetted on that basis. I think many of the people he's friends with and ideas he's believed in only work if he's got utter contempt for our country.

But the real bombshell in this video is the scrambling in the MSM to explain what Critical Race Theory is... apparently no big deal.

Love. You note the Splc estimate of hate groups. I presume you have seen their site and delved further into the composition of many of these "organizations". If you have then you know that the SPLC finished its work years ago and has struggled to discover such a piddling group of loser haters in recent years to justify its continued existence.

"Bell’s ideas were not only radical, but bizarre. After leaving Harvard (he resigned in 1992), he wrote a racialist, antisemitic fictional essay titled “The Space Traders,” which Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski described in the New York Times with disgust:Imagine, if you will, that space aliens land in the United States and offer ''untold treasure'' in exchange for surrendering all black citizens to them. What does white America do? It votes to accept the deal by overwhelming margins. So says the law professor Derrick Bell, who poses the question in an allegorical tale he calls ''The Space Traders.''There is opposition, however. Jews condemn the trade as genocidal and organize the Anne Frank Committee to try to stop it. Empathy from another group that has suffered oppression? Not according to Bell. Instead, Jews worry that ''in the absence of blacks, Jews could become the scapegoats.''

Michael said..."If you have then you know that the SPLC finished its work years ago and has struggled to discover such a piddling group of loser haters in recent years to justify its continued existence."

That's actually quite the opposite...and if you took the time READ TODAY'S NEWS...instead of posting silly drivel...you'd already know that:

(He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a supporter of New Deal (a Marxist?), supported Hubert Humphrey for Senator, and opposed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 which had been passed by the Republicans.)

You can twist and turn it all you want, but my point was directed at you and others...whining to high heaven...about things President Obama said or did 22 years ago.

Why is it so hard for you to grasp that concept of reality...that people can change?

And what possible fucking difference does Bell or any of this have to do with TODAY?

Other than desperately trying to find something to bitch about...nothing.

:Here's how Judge Richard Posner described the concept: "What is most arresting about critical race theory is that . . . it turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative. Rather than marshal logical arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories--fictional, science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal--designed to expose the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today. By repudiating reasoned argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."

Bell's having advanced that line of argument--which has gained almost no support in the federal judiciary--is what Obama compared to the work of Rosa Parks in advancing civil rights."

I'll make it easy for you: Do you think Critical Race Theory -- the idea that the American legal system is so embedded with racism that a neutral application of the law is impossible -- is a legitimate theory.

Answering that will save you and everyone a lot of time, since it is at the heart of this very post.